And poor Phil Caradoc's voice, carolling this local ditty, was the last sound I heard, as I took the path that led first towards Balaclava and thence to the place of my destination, while the sun of the last day of November was shedding lurid and farewell gleams on the spires and white walls of Sebastopol. Many descriptions have rendered the name and features of Balaclava so familiar to all, with its old Genoese fort, its white Arnaout dwellings shaded by poplars and other trees, that I mean to skip farther notice of it, and also of the mud and misery of the place itself--the beautiful and landlocked harbour, once so secluded, then crowded with man-of-war boats and steam launches, and made horrible by the swollen and sweltering carcasses of hundreds of troop-horses, which our seamen and marines used as stepping-stones when leaping from boat to boat or to the shore. Some little episodes made an impression upon me, which I am unlikely to forget, after approaching Balaclava by a cleft between those rocky heights where our cavalry were encamped, and where, by ignominiously making draught-horses of their troopers for the conveyance of planks, they were busily erecting a town of huts that looked like a "backwood" hamlet. A picturesque group was formed by some of the kilted Highland Brigade, brawny and bearded men, their muscular limbs displayed by their singular costume, piling a cairn above the trench where some of their dead comrades lay, thus fulfilling one of the oldest customs of their country--in the words of Ossian, "raising the stones above the mighty, that they might speak to the little sons of future years." Elsewhere I saw two Frenchmen carrying a corpse on a stretcher, from which they coolly tilted it into a freshly dug hole, and began to cover it up, singing the while as cheerily as the grave-digger in _Hamlet_, which I deemed a striking proof of the demoralising effect of war--for their comrade was literally buried exactly as a dog would have been in England; and yet, that the last element of civilisation might not be wanting, a gang of "navvies" were laying down the sleepers for the first portion of the camp-railway, through the main street of Balaclava, the Bella-chiare of the adventurous Genoese.